Transcript lightly edited for clarity

Gary Bernier:

Aaron, we’re going to talk about the five things that your AdWords person should be talking to you about regularly.

Aaron Konzelman:

Awesome.

Gary Bernier:

So I hear Roy talk a lot about the digital weasels and I’ve taken over a number of accounts for clients. And so these are five things that if they’re not talking to you about, they’re probably not doing the job you need done. So the way they make money in AdWords is you being lazy, you set it and forget it. And that’s the way I inherit most accounts. So one of the things Google did recently was they expanded their text ad. So now you’ve got three lines of headline. And two lines of description, which gives you more room to say what you need to say. You don’t have to cut it down or cobble it up as much, but it also takes up more screen real estate.

Adwords Rule 1

Aaron Konzelman:

Ah, okay.

Gary Bernier:

So they usually beat the two line headline ads. I say “usually” because every once in a while, if you did a good job on those, they’re still winning. But you generally need to use the bigger ones and take up that real estate because it pushes everybody else down the page and on mobile helps you fill up the screen.

Aaron Konzelman:

Yes. Okay.

Gary Bernier:

So they should be showing you what they’ve done with that extra space. That’s the first thing. The second thing is everybody talks about Click Price and Click Prices should not matter, right? They should be either doing Cost Per Acquisition or going for Maximum Conversions. So they should actually be paying for an Acquisition Cost or Conversion Cost, which means they’ve gone deeper, they’ve done the thing on your website you wanted them to do.

Adwords Rule 2

Aaron Konzelman:

Right.

Gary Bernier:

If it’s just getting them to the website with a click, who cares??? But this is a change in your bidding process. So they need to be talking to you about how they’re spending your money. How are they making the bids for you?

Aaron Konzelman:

Okay.

Gary Bernier:

Third thing they need to do is they need to be testing or talking to you about responsive ads. So Google’s AI is getting smarter. And so they think they can write ads better than people. So they’ve built a system where you can pump in like 15 headlines and four lines of description. And depending upon the search term that gets typed in Google will assemble the ad.

Adwords Rule 3

Aaron Konzelman:

Oh, I got you.

Gary Bernier:

From those 15 headlines and those four lines of description it puts something together. Now the reporting on it sucks. I’ll be honest. And they’re not outperforming the human written ads yet.

Aaron Konzelman:

Of course. Yeah.

Gary Bernier:

But you ought to be playing with the system and studying the system and trying to make it work for your customers, because Google’s AI is only gonna get better.

Aaron Konzelman:

Yeah, exactly.

Gary Bernier:

So number four, I call it “No Playing Games.” If they’re doing any display advertising, they want to make sure that they’re not paying for any clicks from games. So Google didn’t tell anybody when they did this. It just kind of happened. On their gaming platform, everybody that hooks up through Google play and their platforms for their apps where they’re showing off the Google Ads — they started feeding everybody’s business ads over there onto the games. So the impression count went up, the clicks went up. Now they’re cheap clicks because it’s display, but they’re useless. So just cut them out.

Adwords Rule 4

Gary Bernier:

And number five, constantly test. So your AdWords person should be talking to you about the tests they started running 30 days ago, 60 days ago… How’s it going? What’s working? What’s winning? Now Google believes in this so much that they’ve actually created something called Drafts and Experiments. And so a Draft allows you to make a whole bunch of changes to something that you see. Copy an existing thing, you muck about with it, and then you can turn it into an experiment. And the experiment runs side-by-side.

Adwords Rule 5

Aaron Konzelman:

Like an A/B.

Gary Bernier:

Totally like split testing. Exactly that. So they’ve given you this new mechanism for taking what’s working, copying it, tweaking it, and then running the two in parallel and seeing which one works better.

Aaron Konzelman:

Cool.

Gary Bernier:

So those are the five things that your AdWords person should be having the conversation with you about… Not just saying, “Oh yeah. I got you a bunch of clicks this month.”

Aaron Konzelman:

Great. Thanks man.

Gary Bernier:

I’ll see you next time.

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